Mace chuckled softly. "Will do. Five minutes it is. You found the clothes I left for you?"
"Yes! Now please leave!"
The outer door closed. They looked at each other and then Jess burst into giggles.
Reive smiled, but he didn't feel particularly like laughing. It worried him that Jess seemed, in just a few hours, to have gone from viewing Mace as a stranger to treating him like some kind of older relative. He didn't trust Mace, and it worried him that she did.
Mace was the first member of her kind that she'd met, he reminded himself. At least the first who wasn't trying to attack her. It was little surprise that she'd bonded quickly. And he didn't want to second-guess her; she had spent more time with Mace than he had.
Still ... he was going to need to be suspicious enough for two. Because there was no telling what Mace really had planned.
"I guess we should get dressed before Mace comes back," Jess said. She stifled another giggle behind her hand. Circumstances aside, Reive was glad to see her laugh. She seemed lighter, somehow. Happier than she had been since he'd met her.
All the more reason to make sure this Mace guy didn't break her heart.
We'll protect her, his dragon growled inside him. She's our mate.
Their mate. His mate.
And then reality crashed down on him fiercely, penetrating the warm haze of unaccustomed good feelings that had surrounded him ever since he'd awakened with Jess's warm body pressed to him.
His mate.
And he was going to die, and leave her alone.
Shock and horror froze him where he stood.
You didn't get over that. Nobody got over that.
He had no right to do that to her. And he had no idea what to do about it. There was nothing to do about it.
Except not die.
Which might be out of his control.
Jess, who had started to turn to leave the bathroom, turned back as if she'd sensed his turmoil. Perhaps she had; mates generally had a sixth sense for each other's emotional state. "Reive, what's wrong? Are you hurting?"
He was, ever since Mace's proximity had sparked a fresh wave of pain in his arm and shoulder, but his body wasn't where most of the pain was coming from.
He'd finally found his mate. And he was about to deal her an injury that would never heal.
So we can't die, his dragon said. It was far closer to the forefront of his mind than it had been in months. When it had come forward for Jess, it hadn't gone back down, which was probably contributing to the amount of energy he currently had.
It might not be up to us, he replied in his head.
We will simply have to make it be so.
You couldn't really argue with your inner animal. At least it was hard to. It was your instinctive side, the part of you that was sure enough to overcome the doubts of your conscious mind. As he had said to Jess, it was the part that just knew things.
Wish I was as sure as you are, dragon side of me.
"Reive?" Jess said again. Her soft hand brushed his shoulder.
Reive touched her chin, drawing her forward, and lightly kissed her lips. The touch was soothing, but more than that, it was a reminder of everything he had to fight for, all the reasons why he needed to make this work.
"I'm just hungry." He smiled. "And Mace will be coming back soon. Unfortunately. But at least he'll have food with him."
"Right," she said. "Let's get dressed. And while we do that, I can get you caught up on what you missed this morning."
Reive
Jess sketched out the broad strokes of a story Reive wished he hadn't missed, while they dressed in the slightly ill-fitting but clean clothes that had been left for them. Mace's jeans were baggy around Reive's legs, and the burgundy sweater hung off his shoulders. He was more slightly built than Mace, but it wasn't all bone structure. He'd lost both weight and muscle mass since he'd been sick.
We're going to fix this, his dragon said. We have to. For our mate.
You better be right.
"Wow, whoever Mace borrowed these from has retro taste," Jess said, doing a small pirouette to look down at the cuffs of the borrowed jeans swishing around her ankles. "Look, these are bell-bottoms. Embroidered, even. Very 1970s."
"Are there other gargoyles here?" Reive asked. "Besides Mace, I mean."
Jess looked surprised. "Um ... I don't know, actually. Why?"
"Because if your clothes belong to one of them, they might be that old, or considerably older." Reive sat on the end of the couch and carefully opened the book they'd come so far to find. "Dragons are very long-lived. Gargoyles might be the same. There's no telling how old Mace really is."
"Wow, really? Does that mean I could live that long? How long are we talking here? Wait, if we're not the same—"
"Hundreds of years, possibly. Mates adjust their lifespan to fit each other."
Jess's face lit up. "Then nothing can happen to you, right?"
Reive shook his head. "It doesn't work that way. We can still die of any normal thing. It's just that we'll age at the same rate." Her face fell, and he looked quickly down at the book in his lap. "Have you had a chance to look through this yet?"
"Some. I've only just started. It's not obvious whether there's a solution in it, but now that we can combine it with my translated pages, Mace thinks it might be useful."
Mace again. If that guy had used some kind of mind-magic on Jess to get her to trust him, Reive planned to take him apart slowly, stone or no stone.
"Feeling okay?" Jess asked. She sat down beside him and leaned gently against him to look at the book past his arm. She smelled wonderful, shower-fresh with a faint hint of some old perfume from the clothes she wore.
"Yeah, I'm okay." He turned a page. This book was as indecipherable to him as the other one, though he thought he could recognize some similarities in the diagrams. "Can you read this?"
"Most of it." She leaned over his shoulder. "It's very metaphysical, for the most part. Runes and talk about phases of the moon and that sort of thing. I thought if we could find this half of the book, maybe it would have more concrete information than the first half. It doesn't. But ..."
"But we've both seen some pretty crazy things."
Jess blew out her breath. "No kidding."
She was so close that he couldn't resist brushing his lips along the soft skin beside her eye. She had just turned her head for a deeper kiss when a sharp spike of pain rippled along his side and down his arm. She flinched in the same instant.
"You felt that?" he asked quietly.
"I ... felt you feel it, I think." She brushed her fingers lightly over the back of his hand. "Is that what it's like for you to be around us?"
"Not you." The pain was already fading as long as she had her hand on his.
Mace's brisk knock came a moment later. Jess hesitated, then got up and went to open the door, the flared legs of the bell-bottoms swishing around her bare feet.
"Good morning, again," Mace said, as he entered with a large tray balanced in either hand. "I hope you're prepared for a good solid—" He stopped, staring at Jess.
"What?" Jess said nervously, shoving a stray curl of her damp hair behind her ear. "Am I that much of a mess?"